I'm a former senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine. I have written about entrepreneurship for publications such as Crain's New York Business, Fortune, Money, Inc., Working Mother, CNBC and many others. I'm also co-founder of 200kfreelancer.com, a community for indie professionals looking to build a thriving business.

What Customers Want: Companies That Bend the Rules

Company owners and top executives give a lot of thought to winning and keeping customers–and they spend a lot of time and money on things like PR, thought leadership and trying to build viral Facebook campaigns. But the real front lines of building a business are in the small, daily interactions employees have with customers. No one should ever think about Kafka when your business comes to mind, unless you happen to be selling books.

Consider these examples of customer service.

A long-time customer at a bank sets up a small-business account there. Five days after depositing a check from a big-company client, a manager tells her the check will not clear for another six days–bringing the total to 11 days–because the bank has no way of telling if it is fraudulent. When she asks for an explanation, the banker says a hold has been placed on her account because it is new, as a matter of routine. “But I’ve been with this bank for 23 years! These checks usually clear in two days,” the customer says. The employee is unbending, and, though ostensibly friendly, seems determined to avoid doing anything to actually resolve the situation. “Have a nice day,” says the smiling banker at the end of the frustrating transaction. Yeah, right. The distressed client contacts a higher-up about the experience by email, and the hold on the account is released the next day, making the funds available. The higher-up phones to apologize.

A mother goes shopping for swimsuits at Sears with her three young daughters and two-year-old son, who is tired, cranky and trying to make a break for it. It’s late June, and much of the selection in the Land’s End department is sold out. Only two of the three girls can find swimsuits in their size. A friendly sales clerk sees the third girl’s disappointment and offers to check the stock room to see if there are any other suits. He is working alone and has to leave the floor unattended. Coming up dry, he offers to place an order for the girl’s swimsuit online from the store, for free home delivery.

A customer of a local eyeglass shop comes in with a child’s pair of broken frames, the day after a $25 insurance plan covering repairs has expired. The frame shop replaces the frames without an extra charge, anyway. An employee also repairs the old pair and lets the parent keep them as a spare, despite the company’s usual requirement that they be sent back to headquarters.

I’m a journalist, so many companies pitch me to spread the word about their products and services. Good publicity is invaluable. But PR and social media campaigns can only go so far. What really helps build a brand is the everyday interactions that it has with its customers. These can lead to repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals–or drive customers away.

All three of the examples above came from my own life recently. What they have in common: An employee went out of his or her way to help me (albeit, in the case of the bank, at the point where I was contemplating closing all of my accounts). These workers weren’t following a canned script. They were thinking like owners of the company who wanted to keep my business. They treated me the way they would want to be treated, even if it meant ignoring the official company rule book. And, as a result, I told other people about the experience. In the case of the lens shop, I’ve purchased two more pairs of glasses for my daughter from the same store. And there, on a very small scale, is how great customer service contributes to the organic growth of a business.

Millions of business people and consumers have experiences like these every day. Whether interactions with a company leave the customer feeling good or bad, they don’t happen by accident. Somewhere down the line, management has either sent a signal to employees that it’s smart to take the initiative to keep a customer happy–and perhaps even rewarded its team for doing so–or has delivered a message that it’s okay to skimp on service and disappoint customers, as long as they go through the motions and say, “Have a nice day” at the end.

The flip side of this is that lousy customer service is a lost opportunity. Here are two examples of companies that drove me away recently, or are close to doing so. The pain of dealing with them is too great.

For one of my editorial consulting clients, I’m involved with using a CRM system. In one week alone, I had to spend 10 hours, along with an employee who uses it, on the phone with the CRM company’s tech team, because it was malfunctioning. Each time we called, we had to fill out a “ticket” reporting the problem, only to get nowhere. It was agonizing. We ended up doing a work-around. Other clients have asked me about CRM systems. I would not recommend this brand.

Or take the case where my laptop suddenly went black, with a fully charged battery. When I called the PC company’s help line, an employee at a call center led me through a series of scripted questions–and then, in a friendly voice, concluded the motherboard was shot and I had to send it in. When I asked her about other possibilities, she didn’t seem any more knowledgeable about technology than I was. Oh, and she had no record of my insurance to cover this–until I produced a code from the receipt. Have a nice day!

After I hung up, I started Googling and discovered there’s a known complaint about the power cords for my particular computer–and tried using another cord I had on hand. Bingo! My previously slow computer was like an espresso addict after a trip to Starbucks. And now, after years of buying my computers from the same brand, I’ve started thinking about switching to a Mac the next time I buy a laptop. Why does the PC company sell computers with junky power cords? And why doesn’t the company’s IT help staff know how to diagnose a simple known problem like this?

It’s a crazy economy, so great customer service alone isn’t enough to ensure that a company survives and grows. But executives who figure out how to give their teams the freedom to deliver it in creative ways will find themselves in a lot better shape in a viral, crowdsourced world than those who can’t figure out how to do this. You don’t want your employee’s smiles or cheerful reading of a customer service script to call to mind an evil, grinning clown. Your customers really do want to have a nice day.

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Agree. Customer service is extremely important. In your case of the incompetent laptop support staff, it seems that their support system is not an advanced one, that is, it should offer the techie two things instantly upon problem report, a) what are the most common problem for this model of the laptop? b) what are the two most frequent causes for this particular problem? They are the starting point of problem resolution. With regard to laptop selection, there are a few great PC laptop brands, hope you would select another one, not that I’m against Mac.

We arm our staff with policies to defend our business, but often forget to empower them to defend our brand and our reputation.

We want to be the one making the decision when money is spent or time is committed to resolve a problem. We believe that no one would make the same decision we would because the staff isn’t spending their money, they’re spending “ours”.

Because we aren’t always around when these decisions must be made, we make policy. Policies produce consistent day-to-day handling of “normal” operations, a good thing.

These same policies often discourage taking responsibility (“It’s our policy” and “There’s nothing else I can do”). When combined with job insecurity policies (“violating policy is a termination offense”), they prevent your staff from doing the right thing when the unusual occurs.

For edge cases (like the bank) that require conscientious thought, policies are often silent. They rarely say (for example) “If use of this policy could damage our reputation, do what you think is best for the customer if the short-term cost to the company is less than (whatever), otherwise ask for approval of your resolution.”

As management, we have to empower our people to think and do what’s right – even if it isn’t policy in every case. It takes trusting our people, which starts by hiring for character and training for the job.

Thanks for these thoughtful comments, Mark. What is the best way for management to indicate to employees that it’s okay to use their best judgement in “edge” situations–and that they won’t be fired for it?

I currently work for a business that has this situation nearly every day. We have several policies that are bent or broken simply to satisfy a customer. There are two large problems that I see rising out of these situations: 1) Non-managerial employees are told to “state then break” the rules all the time. We are sometimes allowed to do this and yet other times (for the same situation) we’re not. It creates an environment of inconsistency between management and staff which also frustratingly transfers to the clients!

2) The frequency at which the company allowed a “state then break” situation is very high which creates an entire group of customers returning, but also expecting the same allowances they have been given before. An example: Policy states that we have to check identification for each and every client whether they are returning/regular guests or first time guests. This isn’t a problem for first time guests because they don’t know any better, but lately we’ve had to crack down on the leniency once given to regular guests. They now complain every time and act like this is something new (which to some of them, I’m sure it is!) and that it’s completely unnecessary. It’s a small thing that frustrates a large group of our clientele. And we’re usually stuck having to say “I’m sorry, it’s been a policy for a long time that we’ve been lenient with in the past!” Which is completely ridiculous when really thought about. Their line of thought most likely is this: Someone who’ve been a regular client at an establishment who is recognized by at least 80% of the staff, should not be bothered for their ID.

In any case, this article really struck a chord with me as I am looking to move up into upper management. It shows how important it is to have consistency in your policies, yet also not to the point where you squelch out the individual power of the non-managerial staff.

You raise some really good points, lovendestroy. Seems like you should be allowed to bypass the ID checks for guests whom everyone recognizes. I hope you’ll have a chance to free the staff to use their common sense when you make it to top management.